Education for development. OECD, foreign assistance and educational reform in late-Franco Spain

Abstract

During the 1960s, the OECD, through its Mediterranean Regional Program, worked cooperatively with authorities in Spain to promote changes in the country’s educational system that would strengthen economic growth. The objective was to integrate Spain into the «global architecture of education», which conceived investments in the cultivation of human capital as an essential factor to ensure the development and modernization of its productive sector. UNESCO, the World Bank, and other international organizations cooperated in a similar fashion, providing outside assistance in the dissemination of methods and knowledge to influence the education reforms being undertaken in Spain. The approaches included in the PRM became a guide for the Spanish authorities and found their way into the Planes de Desarrollo (plans for development), though more as ideals than as realities due to a systematic failure to comply with the measures prescribed. In spite of everything, that international influence occasioned an opening up to pedagogical methods that altered teaching practices and were a shock to a stagnant, reactionary, and class-based system, thus contributing to its gradual transformation. At the start of the following decade, a more all-encompassing reform was attempted with the General Education Law of 1970, integrating the economic and the social dimensions of change to mitigate the political conflicts that were eroding the dictatorship. Again, the results were mediocre, this time due to the combined effects of detractors from inside and outside the Franco regime.